July - August 2001

Your Engineering Heritage:

Tattoos: Electrical Engineers Played a Role in Giving Them — And Even Taking Them Away

by Dave Morton

Although one in 10 Americans has a tattoo, we at the IEEE History Center suspect that few electrical engineers sport these decorative marks. Our children's generation, however, has bought into tattooing as a form of self-expression; in fact, it has become one of the hottest trends among today's young people.

But if butterflies on our little girls' ankles or cryptic symbols on our sons' biceps make us cringe, we have only ourselves to blame. Or rather, we can blame one of the founders of the electrical engineering profession.

The electric machine that tattoo artists use today is a handheld solenoid attached to several long needles and fitted with an ink reservoir. To make a tattoo, an artist draws a design on the skin; the needles oscillate rapidly, making hundreds of tiny punctures and forcing ink into the flesh. The ink remains in place, and once the wound has healed the design can be seen beneath our translucent skin.

New York artist Samuel F. O'Reilly invented the original electric tattoo machine in around 1891. O'Reilly had been using the hand method of tattooing, which had been practiced for millennia, but this method was tediously slow. The demand for more elaborate tattoos, particularly among circus artists and sailors, led O'Reilly to seek a faster method.

O'Reilly stumbled onto a device called the Electric Pen. This device, invented by none other than Thomas A. Edison, had been on the market since the 1870s and was part of a document duplication system used by businesses. The handheld Electric Pen was battery-operated, and used a high-speed reciprocating motor to drive a single needle. It did not apply ink, but merely perforated holes in a special master form. The master form then became a stencil, and ink rolled onto its surface passed through the holes to make copies onto blank sheets placed underneath the stencil. At a time when the typewriter was still not widely used, the Electric Pen represented a great improvement over hand copying.

O'Reilly added multiple needles and an ink reservoir, and earned a U.S. patent in 1891. 

Perhaps it is unfair to "blame" (or, some would say, "credit") Edison for this application of his invention, since it is unlikely that he ever considered using it this way. In fact, after Edison conceived the Electric Pen in the 1870s, he sold the patent rights and moved on to bigger and better things. Even the company that bought the rights to the Electric Pen system was not very interested in the pen itself; they focused on the stencil duplication method. That company, A.B. Dick of Chicago, sold stencil duplicators for many years under the trade name Edison Mimeograph (the proto-photocopier many of us recall from our school days).

But we digress. If the current generation of tattooed youths owes something to the electrical engineering, so, too, do the thousands of people who have gotten tattoos only to regret their decisions. Early methods of removing these "permanent" designs included
injecting acid, mother's milk, or even urine under the skin, before physicians stepped in to develop more sanitary and scientific techniques (such as freezing the skin with liquid nitrogen and lifting off the design with forceps). In the early 1960s, someone suggested that a better way might be to attack the pigments directly using a new invention called the "laser." Although laser removal was too expensive to catch on at the time, it represented one of the earliest contributions of electrical engineering to the biomedical engineering field.

David Morton, Ph.D., works at the IEEE History Center at Rutgers University. Visit the IEEE History Center's Web page at: www.ieee.org/organizations/history_center/.